quartet
by seretella
Summary: divinity is a crosshair. / the fourth piece to the legend, and a single dead Hero.


**.title.: **quartet

**.summary.: **divinity is a crosshair. / the fourth piece of the legend, and a single dead Hero.

**.characters.: **Midna - Zelda

**.a/n.:**for the prompts: "taking responsibility"/coping

**X**

"For failing you."

Midna (Twili again and terrifying) is looking straight at her – it rattles Zelda that she is communicating about it this way. She is shrapnel and anger, her proudness crumbled under sudden grief. Midna, she learned from the combination of their souls, feels with all she is, though her skin is sewn tight. And Zelda herself – she has no energy left to be furious or ashamed or proud or sad. Zelda feels her empathy slowly draining, eroding away anything she can comprehend feeling.

"You have not failed." Zelda tilts her hand slowly around the golden glow resting in the air; to a princess years ago, this would be an experience earth-shattering. A piece of the Triforce, circling aimlessly in the air, without host: tangible purity and courage and divinity. But now she can smell the blood on it and the hated stare of her goddesses. She does not fear it nor what can happen to it – the permanence of what had torn it from the spirit of the hero, however, is the shadow her defensive apathy leaves behind to haunt her. "This has happened before, in an era not ours."

"That doesn't make it not a failure." Midna rests her hands stiff on the table. She stares through the golden glow. "I _know_, Zelda, what role I have in this disaster – the goddesses can't order me around, but in the end, I'm still the _guide_. I'm still – his protector. You can't pity me out of taking responsibility."

Pity you? The Triforce shard curls in her palm, folding within its own sunlight. "Fine," she says, "then it is not _me_ whom you have failed. I know your triumph. It is because of us that Ganondorf has been vanquished. Because of us that you are no longer cursed. Hyrule is once again safe."

She's said too much – Zelda blinks in surprise as a blackened whip closes over her wrist, magic yanking the Triforce from her vision. Midna's fingers are curled and stiff, the corner of her mouth tugging against the slip of her fang, and with a slight twitch of trepidation Zelda realizes she is always going to be as volatile as she was when cursed. Her eyes are fighting to be calm and numb, but the red bleeds.

Midna hisses, "What has Link done, then?"

"Refused to be protected by you."

Her knuckles crack against the table when the rope of magic tightens. Before Midna can argue back, she raises her voice in its regally strangled tone: "You were to lead him to the end, Midna. You are not part of us, no matter what you believe. Lenience sews your fate: whether the end held victory or death, depended not on you. Link, he was to complete that end – his task, however, was to conquer. He is the one who has failed."

"You can say this over his body?!"

"_My_ task – is to relive and recite. There is nothing I can do for him anymore. Honouring him is worth nothing. The goddesses do shame him, and I do not ask for them to, but he has rendered his life useless. This piece of the cycle has not been an apocalypse, but it has been a failure all the same."

She allows pause for the words to sink in; the twilit queen's expression does not soften.

"Midna, to time and fate, we are not an orphan queen, a betrayed lord, and a farm child. We are pawns to regulate the world around us and allow the land life. You will never suffer for the consequences like we will. You cannot understand."

Her fingers begin to relax around the fragments of her magic; Zelda takes a slow breath.

She concludes, "I _am_ sorry about Link. I am so, so sorry."

The coil of ink vanishes in a sudden burst. It leaves behind a series of inky rings up Zelda's forearm, and uncertain hesitation in the queen across the table. Her red eyes drift to the lazy spinning of the Triforce shard's lights through Zelda's knuckles, such divine magic unaffected by the futile anger shared between the women. She whispers, "What will happen to it, now?"

"If the three's fates were so liable to be twisted," she opens her fingers over the dimness of the Triforce, "this part of him would now belong to you."

"I don't want it."

"None would."

Zelda tips it weightlessly from her hand so it hovers in the space between her palms, as carelessly present in the dead space of air as if she cannot see the puppet string it merely hangs from. She closes her eyes – and for an instant, feels the bite of tepid, silent agony, the prick of reminder.

"It returns to the goddesses for now. They can have their curse they install so freely."

"Until the next hero," Midna says hollowly.

"Until then."


End file.
